Unp Bison Books: 128 books

One day Roger Welsch ventured to ask his father a delicate personal question: “Why am I an only child?” His father’s answer is one of many examples of the delightful and laughter-inducing ribald tales Welsch has compiled from a lifetime of listening to and sharing the folklore of the Plains....

When the most romantic of cow outfits, the British-owned Matador, shipped out from Texas with 3,000 head of cattle bound for Dakota and the Cheyenne Indian Reservation, an observant young bronc twister named Ike Blasingame rode with them. Dakota Cowboy—which the New York Times calls “warm, human,...

Crazy Horse, the legendary military leader of the Oglala Sioux whose personal power and social nonconformity contributed to his reputation as being “strange,” fought in many famous battles, including the Little Bighorn, and held out tirelessly against the U.S. government’s efforts to confine...

This authentic account of the establishment of the first rapid-communications system between East and West is packed with adventure and real-life heroes—Bob Haslam, who rode unharmed through an ambush of thirty Paiute Indians; Jack Keetley, Warren Upson, and the most famous rider of all, Buffalo...

The Ojibway Indians were first encountered by the French early in the seventeenth century along the northern shores of Lakes Huron and Superior. By the time Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized them in The Song of Hiawatha, they had dispersed over large areas of Canada and the United States, becoming...

Yonnondio follows the heartbreaking path of the Holbrook family in the late 1920s and the Great Depression as they move from the coal mines of Wyoming to a tenant farm in western Nebraska, ending up finally on the kill floors of the slaughterhouses and in the wretched neighborhoods of the poor in Omaha,...

David J. Wishart’s Great Plains Indians covers thirteen thousand years of fascinating, dynamic, and often tragic history. From a hunting and gathering lifestyle to first contact with Europeans to land dispossession to claims cases, and much more, Wishart takes a wide-angle look at one of...

In 1973 the small southwest Nebraska railroad town of McCook became the unlikely scene of a grisly murder. More than forty years later, author James W. Hewitt returns to the scene and unearths new details about what happened. After pieces of Edwin and Wilma Hoyt’s dismembered bodies were...

A Bride Goes West is new and fresh because it is impregnated with a just sense of values about life. When Nannie Tiffany of West Virginia married Walt Alderson, who'd already been on the cattle trail for years, in 1882, they went to Montana to start a little ranch. There's plenty about ranching in this book but what is most valuable is about life, about people in this ranch country.

Downwind is an unflinching tale of the atomic West that reveals the intentional disregard for the inhabitants and the environment in nuclear testing by the federal government and in uranium extraction by mining corporations during and after the Cold War. Sarah Alisabeth Fox interviews residents...

"The perspective of 15 years, painstaking research, thousands of interviews, extensive analysis and evaluation, and the creative talent of John Toland [paint] the epic struggle on an immense canvas. . . . Toland writes with the authority of a man who was there. . . . He tastes the bitterness...

Critics have called David Lavender a "master storyteller" (Library Journal), his prose "virile, disciplined, yet personal" (New York Times), and his book "a balanced, learned, and lively history of an epochal human exploit" (Choice).   Lavender sets the...

Bent's Fort was a landmark of the American frontier, a huge private fort on the upper Arkansas River in present southeastern Colorado. Established by the adventurers Charles and William Bent, it stood until 1849 as the center of the Indian trade of the central plains. David Lavender's chronicle of...

In October 1960, Omaha Central and Creighton Prep met for what many Nebraskans consider the greatest high school football game ever played. Future NFL Hall of Famer Gale Sayers scored seventy points while leading Central’s powerful offense through its first four games. Prep’s strong defense,...